Digital legacy: Amateur heroes of online heritage

How much does it cost to keep a nation’s heritage online? “The price of a cup of Starbucks coffee,” claimed the civic-minded hacker who in January copied and archived 172 websites that the BBC had earmarked for deletion.

People like this anonymous hacker argue that we’re not doing enough to preserve such digital records. These “preservationists” argue that even redundant or outdated websites have historical value – and that it’s not very expensive to preserve them for posterity.

The BBC, which is funded by the British public, attracted opprobrium for its decision. Those who had donated personal stories and images to sites like The People’s War felt betrayed. Surely a titan like the BBC could have afforded the cup-of-coffee cost of keeping the sites online?

Blank cheque

In any case, hardware costs are often dwarfed by the less predictable expenses associated with premises, staff, power, cooling and maintenance. So committing to keep archives online is signing a blank cheque&colon; no surprise that few corporate bosses are willing to risk it to earn a bit of goodwill.

If the financial headaches weren’t enough, preservation is legally problematic, too. It’s not clear who owns much of the material posted to social networks – from personal pictures to conversations between several people. Safer to pull the plug on the lot than to risk outraging netizens by infringing on what they see as their rights.

Even national libraries can’t always save copies of this material. The British Library, for example, is legally entitled to a “deposit copy” of every printed item published in the UK and Ireland – but cannot compel site owners to donate their content.

Volunteer army

That’s why the job of preservation has largely been left to volunteers like Scott’s Archive Team. “Archive Team doesn’t ask. It takes. It takes and it dupes and it saves,” Scott said at a conference earlier this year. “Sometimes, it’s been cheered as it does so. Sometimes it’s been ridiculed, criticised, threatened… but we’re getting stuff done.”

Maybe the amateur approach is best anyway. Brewster Kahle, founder of the venerable Internet Archive, suggests that amateurs’ emotional investment in “community property” offers greater security than any company or even government can ever provide.

For a list of websites at risk of being shut down, or that are already gone, see the Archive Team’s Death Watch.